Page 61 of Broken Heart Syndrome
Tom knew that his parents thought the sun shone out of his backside, and he was an unashamed mummy’s boy. Since the time he was eight and he broke open his piggy bank to offer to take his mum out for lunch on Mother’s Day, she had been firmly wrapped around his little finger. She never missed an opportunity to recount this heartbreaking story of her selfless son, often accompanied by fake gagging sounds in the background from Sarah.
He, in turn, would do anything for his family; even Sarah, who more often than not was a pain in his arse. If there was something he wanted he knew they would help him to get it, and he wanted Frankie. An added incentive for Sarah was the prospect of cousins for the boys, and she was positively gleeful that a woman had not ‘instantly fallen over with her legs akimbo for him’, as she put it.
He’d told them all about Frankie and how he was trying to win her over, and enlisted them to help him suck her into the family. His mum had been excited at first, declaring that Frankie had ‘backbone’ and that it would do Tom good to work for something he wanted for a change, rather than life handing him everything on a plate. Unfortunately, when she met Frankie, she jumped to the same conclusion Tom had years ago.
The fact was that it was very difficult to believe that a woman that looked like Frankie could be insecure or shy. Unfortunately his mum had met some of Tom’s less than likeable girlfriends in the past, and was convinced that Frankie was cut from the same cloth. Beautiful, but cold. And the more his mum had emanated waves of disapproval, the more Frankie had retreated into her shell, eventually barely speaking, and rarely meeting anyone’s eyes but the children’s.
Sarah’s desperate attempt to trigger a reaction by handing Frankie Baby Thomas had backfired in a big way, and just reinforced his mum’s view that she was not the type of family-orientated women she wanted for her son.
Then Frankie had turned it all around. Spectacularly so.
Children, Tom had often found, had an innate instinct when it came to sizing people up. They had all (other than Baby Thomas, who was a newborn, and on his chin-strap with tiredness) instantly warmed to Frankie. It helped that she did not appear to be as intimidated by them as she was by the adults, and therefore felt free to shine her light on them with her gorgeous smiles and soft laughter, gravitating to their end of the table.
When mum heard her talking softly to the boys, with Finlay cuddled on her lap, about being bullied, her heartbreaking words melted whatever disdain she had felt for her. Not only that but Frankie had, in a few minutes, achieved what years of punishments, talks with pre-school and now school could not.
‘Benji’s a special child.’ This had been Sarah’s refrain since he was a year old and already ruling the household. His Grandma, however, described him as an evil genius.
He was bored at school: he could already read by the time he got there and the others were still learning their letters. So he spent his time plotting and recruiting an army of four- and five-year-olds intent on overthrowing the regime.
With the help of his followers he had blocked all the school toilets, locked their teacher in a cupboard, and the most recent (and in Tom’s opinion the most hilarious) was when he somehow got hold of the keys for the window of the classroom and managed to get every single child in the class through it in the two minutes it took for their teacher to go on a bathroom break. On arriving back in the room, and thinking she had misplaced all thirty kids in her care, she had nearly suffered a complete mental breakdown.
To be honest Tom approved heartily of most of Benji’s antics, wishing he had had the balls to try some of that stuff when he was in school. But recently Benji had become impatient with some of his little followers and could be unintentionally cruel. Having the skin of a rhinoceros, Benji had never thought how his actions could hurt the other children. More than anything this had been upsetting Sarah and her husband Rob, who weren’t having any luck getting through to him.
But a short talk from a beautiful, radiant women about how words had hurt her, and Benji was now the champion of any child being picked on in his class.
So, now that Benji was using his powers for good, coupled with the knowledge that Frankie had nursed her own mum for a year whilst she was dying, his family was almost as in love with her as Tom was. Sarah had said she would nail his balls to the wall if he didn’t win her over, and his mum had gone a little crazy, phoning him every day for progress updates, and demanding details. It was getting creepy.
After concluding that by himself Tom was not guaranteed to get the job done, the Longley family had closed ranks and gone on an all-out offensive. At first Frankie was visibly startled by the one-eighty-degree change in attitude from his mum, but gradually she warmed to the older woman, until eventually her light leaked through her shyness and she was exchanging cake recipes and cooking up millionaires’ shortbread for his mum’s book group (his mum passed it off as her own to piss off her main cake rival, Pauline, whose flapjacks had been the undisputed winners up until that point).
Sarah had also taken to phoning and ‘popping in’ on Frankie at random whilst the older kids were in school, with Thomas and Finlay in tow. Sarah’s outrageous personality was matched perfectly by Lou, and the three of them had become friends.
Gradually Frankie had started relaxing around him. He slotted himself into her life and made it clear that he wasn’t going anywhere any time soon. The fact that she didn’t drive and the weather had turned freezing cold had worked in his favour as well.
Seeing as Lou was now a surprising but useful ally, she was conveniently unable to give Frankie lifts to and from work any more. Leaving the way clear for Tom to do so. This meant he got to see her every morning and bring her home at night (he hung around in his office on the days she was on call until she was finished, which he suspected might make him a tiny bit of a sad case, but he was beyond caring). He could tell that all this had frustrated her no end, and initially she’d been resolute in her insistence that he needed to back off.
However, after another ridiculous but cute attempt to eject him from the flat had ended in an all-out snogging session (which was unfortunately interrupted by Lou coming home), he’d heard her mutter ‘it’s too late anyway’ under her breath.
Tom didn’t know what Frankie meant by that, but since she’d said it she had seemed to give in almost completely to her feelings for him. If he’d thought she was amazing before, it was nothing compared to how he felt about her now that she wasn’t holding herself back. She had blossomed over the last few weeks: quick to laugh and smile, shining her light on him unreservedly, even teasing him easily.
He still had to tread carefully. She hadn’t mentioned her father, and when he’d tentatively broached the subject she had just told him that they weren’t in contact that often. From her worried expression, and the way he had felt her stiffen when the topic came up, he thought it best to drop it for now. He did however notice Lou and Dylan exchanging significant looks after redirecting the conversation, and he wasn’t sure what to make of that either.
He’d also noticed that Frankie did not react well to compliments. When he’d told her one day after watching her laugh during his account of the latest Benji escapade (some face-painting involving permanent marker: the entire of the reception class including the girls now had a pirate’s eye patch) that sometimes she was ‘so outrageously beautiful it almost hurt to look at her’, she had looked at him like he’d beamed from another planet, then had gone quiet for the next half hour.
This was not the reaction Tom had been hoping for. He wasn’t usually a man for flowery compliments with women, but what he’d said to Frankie had been the truth and had just seemed to bubble up from his vocal chords without any forethought.
Despite this, Tom knew he was winning, and he was beginning to see just how great a relationship with Frankie was going to be. A couple of days ago he’d been totally snowed under at work, and had an important presentation to give to the ethics committee about a research project that afternoon.
After a laborious post-take ward round, he’d been sitting in his disaster of an office, trying to get all his stuff together (not an easy task as his filing system left quite a bit to be desired) when he heard a soft knock on the door.
‘Come in,’ he said tersely, in no mood for interruptions. To his surprise it was Frankie who had pushed the door open (there were a fair few journals stacked behind it) and stepped into the office, cautiously treading around the piles of papers on the floor.
He’d managed a small, harried smile for her. ‘Sorry, Frankie, did you need something? Afraid I’m slightly up shit creek without a paddle here.’
She’d hesitated for a moment, something Tom had noticed her doing often with him before she said something that would expose her and potentially meet with rejection. Then she moved forward and further shocked him by running her hand through his hair, and kissing his cheek.
In a day that had been unrelentingly crap, that moment of spontaneous affection from her lightened his mood and made the heavy cloud of stress over him suddenly feel like it was lifting.
‘I, um … remembered about the presentation and I wanted …’ she took a deep breath and closed her eyes briefly, ‘I wanted to make sure you ate lunch and see if you needed help to …’ she bit her lip. ‘I thought you might have trouble finding the stuff you needed in the office.’ She put a brown paper bag in front of him and Tom dug into it, finding a chicken and bacon sandwich (his favourite), a coke, and a piece of her millionaires’ shortbread.
